A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present

INTRODUCTION

A century ago the Russian Empire contained the largest Jewish community in the world, numbering about five million people. Today the Jewish population of the former Soviet Union has dwindled to perhaps half a million, but they still constitute perhaps the third-largest Jewish community in the world. In the intervening century the Jews of that area have been at the center of some of the most dramatic events of modern history—two world wars, revolutions, pogroms, political liberation, repression, and the collapse of the USSR. They have gone through dizzyingly rapid upward and downward economic and social mobility. In only one century Russian and Soviet Jews have expanded the literatures of Hebrew and Yiddish and made major contributions to Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian literatures, as well as to some of the other cultures of the area. When given the chance, they have contributed greatly to science and technology, scholarship and arts, industry, and popular culture. For these achievements they have been applauded and cursed, praised and envied. The Jews themselves have disagreed profoundly about where and how to make their contributions. Some dedicated their lives to the country of their birth, while others ultimately rejected it and sought to build up other lands.

This has been a century of great enthusiasms and profound disappointments. Jews have eagerly embraced programs to reform Russia or to leave it; to lose themselves within the larger population or to develop a distinctive culture of their own; to preserve traditional Jewish culture or to root it out completely. Probably most Jews throughout the period lived their lives without embracing any of the ideologies that competed for their allegiance. They settled for living their family and professional lives as best they could, just like most people in any society. But many wrestled with larger, more abstract questions. Throughout most of the period Jews felt that their situation was abnormal, in need of improvement. While some believed that this condition could not be changed, others were determined to find ways of improving their situation. For a long time Israeli political parties and movements could trace their ancestry directly back to Russia. Smaller Russian immigrations placed their stamp on Western Europe and Latin America as well.

This turbulent century was only the second in which large numbers of Jews have been under Russian rule. There has long been a Jewish presence in territories of the former Soviet Union, but masses of Jews became Russian subjects only when the empire annexed eastern Poland between 1772 and 1795. Greek inscriptions in areas around the Black Sea attest to the presence of Hellenized Jews in the early centuries of the Common Era, and hundreds of years ago Jews migrated to Central Asia and the Caucasus as well. In the eighth century the rulers and upper classes of the Kingdom of the Khazars in the lower Volga and Crimea adopted Judaism. There were Jews in Kievan Rus in the tenth century and in the Crimea in the thirteenth. But the Russian tsars kept Jews out of their territories as much as they could. In 1727 all Jews were formally expelled from the country, and in 1739 all Jews were ordered to leave territories annexed by Russia from Ukraine and Belorussia. Much of the animus against Jews stemmed from Christian beliefs that the Jews had killed Christ. Tsarina Elizabeth, who ruled from 1741 to 1762, responded to merchants in Ukraine and Riga who were pleading with her to allow Jews to trade there by writing, From the enemies of Christ I wish neither gain nor profit.

But after the partitions of Poland nearly half a million Jews found themselves under Russian rule. In order to minimize the damage they might inflict on Russia, they were confined by law to the Pale of Settlement, essentially those areas that they were already inhabiting but that had now come under Russian sovereignty. For the first half century after the partition of 1772 the Jews were able to carry on their traditional way of life pretty much without significant interference. But during this period, as the historian John Klier has observed, Russian Judeophobia was largely transformed from a simple, primitive hatred based on a view of the Jews as deicides into a set of more sophisticated, modern myths, encompassing a view of the Jews as participants in a conspiracy directed against the very basis of Christian civilization. This view predominated in the second half of the nineteenth century, but its foundations were laid in the period from 1772 to 1825.¹ Beginning in 1825 the tsars began to deal vigorously with what they saw as their Jewish problem, setting off the cycle of repression and relaxation that was to create and re-create enormous Jewish ambivalence toward their homeland. In the last one hundred and twenty years or so Jews and the peoples among whom they have lived have been locked into a tempestuous, intense relationship from which none of the parties has been able to free itself completely; neither have they been able, in many cases, to resolve their differences. On the other hand, that relationship has produced great achievements and advances for both Jews and others. Thus the modern history of the Jews in Russia, the Soviet Union and its successor states is streaked with light and shadow. It is a story still unfolding, one likely to continue to tell of multiple ambiguities and complex ambivalences on the part of everyone involved.

A CENTURY OF AMBIVALENCE

1

CREATIVITY VERSUS REPRESSION:

THE JEWS IN RUSSIA, 1881–1917

Early Sunday afternoon, March 1, 1881, Tsar Alexander II left his palace in St. Petersburg to review the maneuvers of a guards battalion. He was known as the Tsar Liberator because he had emancipated millions of serfs, reformed the legal and administrative systems, eased the burdens of military service, and allowed more intellectual freedom. Nevertheless the revolutionaries of the Narodnaia Volia (People’s Will) organization described him as the embodiment of despotism, hypocritical, cowardly, bloodthirsty and all-corrupting. . . . The main usurper of the people’s sovereignty, the middle pillar of reaction, the chief perpetrator of judicial murders. As long as he did not turn his power over to a freely elected constituent assembly, they pledged to conduct war, implacable war to the last drop of our blood against the sovereign and the system he headed.

Well aware of the danger to his life, the tsar usually varied his travel routes. On this cloudy day, as his carriage turned onto a quay along the Neva River, a young man in a fur cap suddenly loomed up in front of the royal entourage and threw what looked like a snowball between the horse’s legs. The bomb exploded but wounded the tsar only slightly. His Imperial Highness got out to express his solicitude for a Cossack and a butcher’s delivery boy who had been severely wounded. Turning back to his carriage, he saw a man with a parcel in his hand make a sudden movement toward him. The ensuing explosion wounded both the tsar and his assailant. Rushed to the Winter Palace, the tsar died within an hour. His assailant died that evening without revealing either his name or those of his Narodnaia Volia co-conspirators. But the man who threw the first bomb, a recent recruit to the revolutionary ranks, informed on his comrades to the police interrogators. The sole Jew among those comrades was Gesia Gelfman, a young woman who had run away from her traditional home to avoid a marriage her parents had arranged for her when she was sixteen. She was found guilty of conspiracy to murder the tsar, as were another woman and four men. All were sentenced to hang. Because Gelfman was pregnant, her sentence was commuted to life at hard labor. She died a few months after giving birth, possibly because of deliberate malpractice, and her infant died at about the same time.

Soon after the assassination of Alexander II and the ascension to the throne of Alexander III, a wave of pogroms swept over Russia and the Ukraine as the word spread that the Jews had murdered the Little Father in St. Petersburg. A quarter century of relative tranquility and modest progress for the Jews had ended. Jews had entered the Russian Empire in large numbers only a century before, when the imperial appetite of the tsars led them, reluctantly, to swallow unwanted Jews along with the coveted territories of Poland divided among the Russian, Hapsburg, and German empires. The huge Jewish population of the Polish territories was taken in, though barred from moving elsewhere in the empire and confined to the Pale of Settlement. For about a hundred years thereafter they had experienced cycles of repression and relaxation. Sometimes the hand of the tsars would come down heavily on the Jews, while at other times it beckoned seductively and urged them to change their foreign ways and assimilate into the larger society. For nearly a century Russian society and its leadership had tried to change the Jews. Indeed, some of the Jews themselves preached a reform of Jewish ways so that they would be more acceptable to Russian society. But a few decades before the assassination of Alexander II, a handful of Jews began trying to change not only themselves but Russian society and its political system as well. During the century following 1881 the dialogue between Jews and their neighbors was to be laden with ambivalence and distrust, but also with great hope and idealistic aspirations.

Maria Grigorevna Viktorovich and her daughter, Esfir Aronovna, Tomsk, Siberia, 1914. Credit. Berta Rostinina

The husband of Maria Viktorovich, Aron Abramovich, merchant of the first guild, a status that allowed him to live outside the Pale of Settlement, St Petersburg, 1900 Credit: Berta Rostinina.

THE IRON TSAR AND THE JEWS

Nicholas I’s ascension to the imperial throne in 1825 marked the start of the most difficult period for Russia’s Jews. As the historian Michael Stanislawski has observed, To Nicholas, the Jews were an anarchic, cowardly, parasitic people, damned perpetually because of their deicide and heresy; they were best dealt with by repression, persecution, and, if possible, conversion.¹ Through various decrees and restrictions, large numbers of Jews were displaced from their traditional occupations and places of residence during the thirty years of Nicholas’s rule. But the harshest decree was issued in 1827, when the tsar ordered that each Jewish community deliver up a quota of military recruits. Jews were to serve for twenty-five years in the military, beginning at age eighteen, but the draftable age was as low as twelve. Those under eighteen would serve in special units called Cantonist battalions until they reached eighteen, whereupon they would begin their regular quarter century of service. As if a term of army service of thirty years or more were not enough, strenuous efforts were made to convert the recruits to Russian Orthodoxy, contrary to the provisions of religious freedom in the conscription law. A double catastrophe fell on the heads of Russian Jewry: their sons would be taken away not only from their homes and families but in all likelihood also from their religion. Little wonder that all sorts of subterfuges were used in attempts to avoid military service. One can even understand the willingness of the wealthy, and of the communal officials whom they supported, to shield their own children from service by substituting others, as was allowed by law. The hapless substitutes were almost always the children of the poor and socially marginal. The decree fell upon them with especial cruelty, as they watched khapers (snatchers) employed by the community tear their children, no less beloved though they were poor, from their arms. The oath of allegiance was taken by the recruits who were dressed in talis and tfilin (prayer shawl and phylacteries) as they stood before the Holy Ark in the synagogue, and was concluded by a full range of shofar blasts. This only further embittered the recruits and their families, not only toward the tsarist regime but also toward the establishment of the Jewish community. A Yiddish folk song of the time expressed the sentiment poignantly:

Trern gisen zikh in di gasn

In kinderishe blut ken men zikh vashn. . . .

Kleyne eyfelekh rayst men fun kheyder

Me tut zey on yevonishe kleyder.

Undzere parneysim, undzere rabbonim

Helfn nokh optsugebn zey far yevonim

Ba(y) Zushe Rakover zaynen do zibn bonim,

Un fun zey nit eyner in yevonim.

Nor Leye di almones eyntsike kind

Iz a kapore far koholishe zind.

Tears flow in the streets

One can wash oneself in children’s blood. . . .

Little babies are wrested from school

And dressed up in non-Jewish clothes.

Our leaders and our rabbis

Even help turn them into Gentiles.

Rich Zushe Rakover has sevens sons

But not one puts on the uniform.

But Leah the widow’s only child

Has become a scapegoat for communal sin.

Alexander Herzen, one of the first ideologists of the Russian revolutionary movement, encountered a group of Jewish recruits in 1835 and described the scene as one of the most awful sights I have ever seen. Pale, exhausted, with frightened faces, they stood in thick, clumsy, soldiers’ overcoats . . . fixing helpless, pitiful eyes on the garrison, soldiers who were roughly getting them into ranks. The white lips, the blue rings under their eyes bore witness to fever or chill. And these sick children, without care or kindness, exposed to the raw wind that blows unobstructed from the Arctic Ocean, were going to their graves.²

Gertsl Yankl (Zvi Herts) Tsam (1835–1915) A former Cantonist who served in Siberia, Tsam appears to have been the only Jewish officer in the tsarist army in the nineteenth century Though he turned one of the worst companies of his regiment into one of the best, Tsam was denied promotion until 1893 when, after forty-one years of service, he was made a full captain shortly before he retired. Tsam was unusual in that he never converted to Christianity and took an active part in Jewish affairs. Credit: Saul Ginsburg.

Since most Jewish men at the time were married in their mid-teens, boys of twelve and under were often offered up to the authorities in order not to tear fathers and husbands away from their families. Between 1827 and 1854, about 70,000 Jews were conscripted, perhaps 50,000 of them minors. Perhaps as many as half the Cantonist recruits were converted to Christianity, passing out of their faith but remaining in the collective memory and folklore of the Jewish people as the Nikolaevskii soldatn.

In his attempt to convert the Jews, Nicholas I used the carrot as well as the stick. In 1841 he asked the enlightened (maskil) German scholar Max Lilienthal to try to persuade the Jews to accept the tsar’s offer of modern Jewish schools that would teach both secular and religious subjects. Believing in the good intentions of the government and the need to bring the benefits of European civilization to the benighted Russian Jews, Lilienthal traveled the Pale, seeking to persuade skeptical communal leaders to subscribe to the program. Most Jewish leaders correctly suspected that this was but another scheme to convert the Jews. Clearly the schools were to promote loyalty to the autocratic system. One of the texts in the required religion class (zakon bozhii) went as follows: In our souls we know that it is as great a sin to disobey the word of the King as it is to transgress the commands of God, and Heaven forbid that we should be ingrates or desecrators of His Holy Name and do so in public or in private.³

There was no rush to the new schools. Lilienthal left for America, where he served as a Reform rabbi. But by 1864 there were nearly 6,000 Jews in Crown schools (and over 1,500 attending Russian schools). These produced the first Russianized intelligentsia among the Jewish population. It is a great historical irony that many graduates of these state-sponsored schools, candidates for conversion to Russian Orthodoxy and loyalty to the autocracy, were caught up in the spirit of radicalism and rebellion infecting part of the Russian intelligentsia. They became the first Jews to seek ways of changing the tsarist system. Some were not consciously motivated by the plight of their own people, or at least they did not admit it; but others’ dissatisfaction with the system was sparked initially by the miserable situation of their coreligionists. The first Jewish graduate of a Russian university (1884), Lev Mandelshtam, exemplified the ambivalence felt by some Jews who had benefited from exposure to Russian culture and had escaped the Pale but could not escape their attachment to Jewishness and Jews.

I love my country and the language of my land but, at the same time, I am unfortunate because of the misfortune of all my fellow Jews. Their rigidity has enraged me, because I can see it is destroying their gifts. But I am bound to their affliction by the closest of ties of kinship and feeling. My purpose in life is to defend them before the world and to help them to be worthy of that defense.⁴

European culture was urged upon the Jews not only by the government, which wished to convert them, but also by Jewish reformers, who wished to improve them. The Haskalah or enlightenment had begun in Germany and had made its way eastward, passing through Galicia on its way to Russia. The maskilim, the enlighteners, sought to bring the benefits of European culture to the Jews and to infuse a new spirit into Jewish culture by reviving the Hebrew language—previously used only in religious texts and rabbinic responsa—for use in novels and scientific textbooks. Some of the maskilim advocated reforms in religion, while others were satisfied to maintain the traditional forms. Until the late 1870s the Russian maskilim maintained their faith in the goodwill of the tsarist authorities who, they believed, were working for the betterment of the Jews. Most religious Jews, and especially the Hassidim among them, opposed the maskilim, suspecting them of undermining traditional authority in the Jewish community and pulling the Jews down the path of acculturation into Russian culture. This, they presumed, could only lead to assimilation and religious conversion. Rejection of the Haskalah united the Hassidim and their traditional opponents, the misnagdim, but could not prevent young people, including yeshiva students, from delving into the forbidden literature and being seduced by the attractions of general European culture. Maskilim wrote novels in Hebrew, sometimes giving them biblical settings, and thereby stimulated the revival of Hebrew as a language of modern expression while simultaneously strengthening attachment to the ancestral homeland. The Zionist movement’s modern political and cultural programs drew directly on the Haskalah. Others, however, were led by their contact with European culture to the larger, less parochial world of contemporary European culture.

Pauline Wengeroff, born in Bobruisk, Belorussia, in 1833, saw the transformation of part of Russian Jewish society in the eighty-three years of her life. In her memoirs she comments on the uncritical enthusiasm with which some Jewish youth embraced the opportunities offered them beginning in the 1840s. They could not acquire the new, the alien, without renouncing the old and repudiating their unique individuality, and their most precious possessions. How chaotically these modern ideas whirled through minds of young Russian Jews! Traditional family ideals disappeared, but new ones did not arise in their stead. Women who wished to impart religious teachings and the ways of the tradition were brushed aside by their husbands. Wengeroff notes that the change in attitudes of the men went only so far. They demanded not only assent from their wives, but also submission. They preached freedom, equality, fraternity in public, but at home they were despots.⁵

Vladimir Medem, a leader of the Jewish Labor Bund, was born in Minsk in 1879 to parents who had been baptized and who baptized their son at birth. He recalled that almost his entire family had been converted. In the sixties, the springtide of Alexander II’s regime, the attitude toward Jews was liberal, and the Jewish community responded ardently in its desire to fuse with the Russian people.⁶ Medem’s father, born in 1836, was able to study in a Russian gymnazium and even in a military academy. As an army doctor, he had little to do with Jewish life, and later on, finding his career blocked by anti-Semitism, he joined the Lutheran church at the age of fifty-six.

A grande dame in Odessa, ca. 1900.

Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronshtein), born in the same year as Medem, came from a family that had not converted; as farmers who had benefited from one of the tsars’ periodic grants of land to Jews, however, they were removed from the intensive Jewish life of the Pale. In his autobiography Trotsky asserted that in my mental equipment, nationality never occupied an independent place, as it was felt but little in everyday life. He claimed that national bias and national prejudices had only bewildered my sense of reason and that his Marxist convictions deepened his belief that internationalism was the only reasonable posture one could assume.⁷

Thus in the last decades of the nineteenth century Jews began to display a variety of attitudes toward their national identities. The vast majority remained firmly rooted in their traditional, primordial Jewish identity, something which was as much a part of them as their own skin, assumed, unquestioned, and perhaps unexamined. Others had examined their Jewishness and found it wanting. They turned to enlightenment in an attempt to synthesize Jewishness and modernity, or they abandoned Jewishness altogether for Christianity and Russian culture or for socialism and internationalist culture. For all of them the traumatic events of 1881–1882 marked an important way station in their journeys of search and self-discovery.

A family in Letichev, Ukraine, turn of the century. Credit: Rose Gold

Peysekh and Leye Zilberman of Bar, Ukraine, where they moved after being forced out of their village by the May Laws of 1882. All six of their children emigrated to the United States, never to see their parents again Credit. Beatrice Silverman Weinreich

TSARIST REPRESSION AND JEWISH REACTION

The sanguine expectations and aspirations of Jews who sought escape from the Pale in an enlightened Judaism within an enlightened Russian society were dashed cruelly by the government-inspired pogroms that rolled over Ukraine and neighboring areas following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. In the large Ukrainian cities and in Warsaw, in the small towns of Ukraine and Belorussia, mobs roamed the streets, attacking Jews, looting their homes and stores, smashing furniture, and generally terrorizing the people, often with policemen looking on. Only after a few days of this would troops be called out to restore order and Jews begin the task of putting their bodies, homes, and lives together. A few hundred lives were lost and there was great material damage, but the psychological impact was greater than the physical one. As Pauline Wengeroff observed, in 1881 the sun which had risen on Jewish life in the fifties suddenly set. . . . Anti-Semitism erupted; the Jews were forced back into the ghetto. Without ceremony, the gateways to education were closed.⁸ In May 1882 laws were passed that prohibited Jews from settling outside the towns and shtetlekh (hamlets). Even those who were already residing permanently in rural areas were forced out under various pretexts so that the countryside would be cleansed of Jews. A Jew who left his home for a few days ran the risk of being barred permanently from his residence. Jews were also forbidden to conduct business on Sundays or Christian holidays. Since they did not work on Saturdays or Jewish holidays, they were severely disadvantaged in the competition with non-Jewish businesses, and the subsistence standard of living of large masses was even further reduced. A numerus clausus or quota system was introduced in Russian schools. An upper limit of 10 percent was established for the proportion of Jewish students in secondary schools in the Pale and 5 percent outside it, 3 percent in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Later these quotas were reduced even further. The logical extension of these restrictions was to limit Jews in the professions, and this was duly enacted. In 1890 the police chief of Moscow ordered that signs on Jewish stores and workshops carry the full Hebrew names and patronymics (father’s name) of their owners. These were to be displayed in bold type only. Lest there be any doubt about the chief’s intent, he added that proper names, such as Moisei, not be used; instead, insulting diminutives (like Moshka) were to be displayed.

With the same sense of cruel irony the government ordered the expulsion of Jews from Moscow on the first day of Passover 1891. Coming on the holiday of national liberation, which celebrates the exodus from Egypt, this new exodus left only a few privileged, longtime Jewish residents in the historic city. In 1891 the grand synagogue had just been constructed in Moscow, and now the authorities issued successive edicts constantly changing its permissible functions. It could not be used for worship and had to be transformed constantly to serve different charitable purposes, each change necessitating reconstruction and driving what was intended to be a showpiece into near bankruptcy. The only institution not harassed was the cemetery. The police did not impose their invariable limitations on this branch of Jewish life. They evidently recognized the Jewish cemetery as a useful institution.⁹

These persecutions crushed many hopes, closed off the options that had begun to develop only a few decades earlier, but led Jews to explore new ways out of their dilemmas. The Russian statesman Pobedonostsev, tutor to the tsars, was believed to have predicted that Russia’s Jewish problem would be solved by having one-third of them killed, one-third of them converted to Christianity, and one-third driven out of the country forever. Indeed, in the 1880s there may have been some acceleration of the tendency to abandon Judaism as a hopeless burden and to pay the price for admission to respectability and civil society. In Wengeroff’s view, In the eighties, with anti-Semitism raging all over Russia, a Jew had two choices. He could, in the name of Judaism, renounce everything that had become indispensable to him, or he could choose freedom with its offers of education and a career—through baptism. Hundreds of enlightened Jews chose the latter. These apostates were not converts out of conviction, nor were they like the Marranos of an earlier age. These apostates disbelieved in all religions. She adds, poignantly, The baptism of my children was the hardest blow of my life.¹⁰

Even baptism was not a guaranteed passage out of the stigma of Jewishness. Medem recalls that, unlike in earlier times, after 1881 No matter how hard one . . . tried to forget one’s former Jewishness, the outside world refused to allow it. In his Christianized home, A sort of code was developed which only the family could understand. Instead of using the word ‘Jew,’ they said ‘Italian,’ or ‘our kind.’. . . My Jewish origin was a burden. It was a shame, a degradation, a sort of secret disease about which no one should know.¹¹ This baptized, second-generation Christian was attracted to Jewish friends involved in socialism. He visited synagogues in Minsk on Yom Kippur, and his wanderings around the poor Jewish quarters of the city on Friday nights made a deep impression on him. Gradually he was drawn back to his ancestral people and sought their liberation through socialism, which was supposed to liberate all the oppressed, irrespective of nationality or religion. When did I clearly and definitively feel myself to be a Jew? I cannot say, but at the beginning of 1901, when I was arrested for clandestine political activity, the police gave me a form to fill in. In the column ‘Nationality,’ I wrote ‘Jew.’¹²

Emigration was much more popular than conversion as a way of escaping from the disabilities imposed by Russia. Though this solution entailed enormous physical, financial, and emotional hardships, increasing numbers of Jews were driven to give up on the lands of their birth, abandon loved ones, and seek their fortunes across the seas. Between 1820 and 1870 only some 7,500 Russian and Polish Jews had gone to settle in the United States. Between 1871 and 1880 the number of those who went to America rose to 40,000, but in the decade following the 1881 pogroms it jumped to 135,000. The stream became a torrent between 1891 and 1910, when nearly one million Jews fled the Russian Empire for the United States. Tens of thousands of others emigrated to Canada, Western Europe, Australia, South America, and South Africa. The very high birth rates of Russian Jews, combined with mortality rates that had dropped dramatically in the nineteenth century, kept the population large despite the emigration. The first comprehensive census ever taken in the Russian Empire counted over five million Jews in 1897.

The Dobrakin family, including the mother, wife, and three daughters of a man who had emigrated to America, 1915. They were separated by World War I. There were many cases of families separated by the war or by the desertion of husbands who emigrated and never sent for their families. Credit: Sonia Bronthman

The anti-Semitic wave of the 1880s and thereafter, coming both from the peasantry below as well as from the tsar and the aristocracy above, engulfed Jews of all political and cultural persuasions. The great majority of Jews remained loyal to their traditions and expected little from the surrounding world—for was it not taught that Esau is always an enemy of Jacob? Ironically, anti-Semitism was perhaps more painful to those who had hoped that education and enlightenment, both that of the Jews as well as of their neighbors, would gradually wipe it out. Some had placed as much faith in the new ideologies as their forefathers had placed in the old. But the old faith seemed more resilient than the new when shocked by the new persecutions.

The idealism and faith of some of the new men is exemplified by Solomon Wittenberg, son of a poor artisan, who was arrested and sentenced to death in 1878 for planning to lay a mine in Odessa harbor in anticipation of a visit by the tsar. He refused to accept Christianity as a way of having his sentence commuted, despite the pleadings of his Jewish mother. In his last testament, he explained his convictions:

Of course, I do not want to die . . . but this should not cast a shadow on my faith and the strength of my convictions. . . . If